July 2025 Newsletter
- Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault
- Jul 3
- 4 min read
“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens…”
– Ecclesiastes 3:1
In This Month’s Issue…
A reflection from Therese DesCamp on couch grass.
Share your contemplations with TCS through a short community survey.
A new TCS video: “Meet TCS Teacher, Therese DesCamp.”
Upcoming retreats.
Wide Spot: Couch grass
by Therese DesCamp
Revulsion is not my instinctive response when someone confides their image of Love. But when she said, “I think of Love—big, universal Love—as couch grass,” I grimaced. Because I detest couch grass.
Let’s start with the definitive: I am a crappy gardener. This doesn’t mean that I don’t grow yummy things. This means that I ignore weeds if at all possible, and I rarely manage to put the garden to bed in the fall. Thus, every spring, I am greeted with a riot of green. None of that lovely green is edible. All of it spreads madly. Most of it is couch grass.
I have never before met such tenacious attachment to survival: couch grass is the plant equivalent of cockroaches. It breeds via seed, but also has stolons that creep along the surface, and huge roots consisting of chains of rhizomes. These rhizomes snap apart like a toddler’s diabolical plastic necklace, each tiny piece perfectly capable of starting a new infestation all on its own.
To add insult to injury—or maybe it’s injury to insult—couch grass exudes phytotoxins, making it harder for other plants to survive.
So when this woman said that she thought couch grass was the perfect metaphor for Love, I thought, “No!”
But I am getting it, slowly. The last two months, as I shoveled out clods of couch grass and shook dirt from the roots; as I knelt on the ground and pulled up the stolons; as I sifted the soil to catch broken rhizomes, I started getting it. Because couch grass is ubiquitous. Couch grass is impossible to control. Couch grass lives on even when you think you have destroyed it forever. There is always some tiny cache of rhizomes, or seeds, or stolons hiding somewhere, ready to grow. In spite of drought, fire, flood, or poison, couch grass continues. When everything else is dead, couch grass is endlessly possible.
While this may not be so great for the strawberries—or spinach, or asparagus, or peas—it makes for a grand metaphor. This unruly, uncontrollable, endlessly energetic grass really is a great way to think about Love, because love is every bit as irrepressible as couch grass. After all, it’s love that propels us to resist when governments tip into autocracy. It’s love that makes us hold on tight to people who are hot messes. It’s love that wakes us up at night to nurse a sick child. It’s love that fuels our practice on the days when there is no time to breathe, powers our letters to Parliament, undergirds our work for watersheds and our commitment to stay deeply present in uncomfortable places. Unruly, inconvenient, endlessly energetic, impossible-to-keep-down Love.
Most horrible human behavior occurs when someone is afraid of losing what they have, or not getting what they want. Fear is endlessly grasping. But Love has an open hand: you can’t grab it because it’s already been given to you. Love disarms greedy fear. So Love is like couch grass in that respect, too: its presence makes it harder for hate to grow.
Couch grass: the new spiritual symbol. Think about that when you weed.
Therese DesCamp is the author of “Hands Like Roots: Notes on an Entangled Contemplative Life,” now available at your local bookstore and online at Indigo.ca and Amazon.ca. If you wish to connect with Therese about this reflection, please e-mail TCS at admin@contempaltive.org. Your e-mails will be forwarded onto her.
Share your contemplations with TCS.
TCS invites you to open 3-minutes of your time to complete a short community survey. Your contemplations are welcomed to inform TCS in the types of retreats we organise, in the selection of our retreat teachers, and about TCS as a society.
New TCS Video.
Meet TCS Teacher, Therese DesCamp.
Check out our social media to view the latest TCS video.
The Contemplative Society Presents…
Online and In-Person at Sorrento Centre, British Columbia, Canada.
Sunday 05 October (5 pm) to Thursday 09 October 9th (12 noon) 2025 (Pacific Time).
Upcoming TCS retreats with Cynthia Bougeault.
→ Saturday, November 29, 2025 10 am–12 noon Pacific Time.
→ Saturday, February 28, 2026 10 am–12 noon Pacific Time.
More details are to come...
The Contemplative Society Presents…
Advent Retreat 2025
“Here I Am.”
A retreat on the theme of mêtis.
Thursday, December 11th, 2025
6:30 to 8:30pm Pacific Time
Led by TCS board members Therese DesCamp, Lorie Martin and Milla McLachlan.
Registration opens after Labour Day.
TCS is a non-profit society and registered charitable organization in Canada run by a volunteer board and a dedicated circle of contemplatives. It was formed in Victoria, BC, Canada in 1997 to serve an emerging contemplative renewal and to support and spread the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault and other distinguished Wisdom teachers. We lovingly carry forward this work, adapting to the changing needs of the present and future, while anchoring ourselves in the ancient Wisdom tradition.
We would love for you to join us as a member and to help sustain and build our offerings with a donation of any amount.
Please visit our website to find out more about membership & support options.
Our mailing address is:
PO Box 23031, Cook St.
RPO Victoria, British Columbia
Canada, V8V 4Z8
E-mail: admin@contemplative.org
Telephone: +1.250.381.9650
Website: www.contemplative.org
Copyright © 2025 – The Contemplative Society. All rights reserved.
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